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Hearing the Movies is designed for easy mapping onto a 15-week semester structure. The book has three parts and fifteen chapters, plus two "interludes" on writing about sound and music in film. See the table of contents below. For a detailed table of contents, with all chapter headings and subheads, see Detailed table of contents. 

The four chapters of Part I encourage development of basic listening and viewing skills. Chapter 1 introduces the sound track elements and the concept of an integrated sound track, the aesthetic standard for sound film since the 1930s. Chapter 2 stresses the musicality of the sound track by introducing musical terms that can also be used to describe speech, sound effects, or the sound track as a whole. Chapter 3 turns to sound and music in relation to narrative space and Chapter 4 deals with sound and time. Also see David Neumeyer's brief descriptions used in class notes during spring 2009.

The five chapters of Part II turn attention more narrowly to music and its characteristic treatment in the sound feature film. Chapter 5 discusses general questions of music in relation to film form; chapters 6 and 7 provide scene analyses that illustrate the function of music as a sound track element in common sequence types, including opening and end credit sequences, as well as montage/fantasy scenes. Film style in broader and narrower senses (genre in the first case, themes and topics in the second) is addressed in chapter 8, and chapter 9 provides illustrations through analyses of dialogue scenes, love scenes, and action scenes. 

Part III lays out a concise history of music and film sound organized around technological innovations and their role in film production and exhibition, and an Afterword comments on the current—and prospective—situation for music and sound in film production and in other venues, particularly those that are Internet-based.